Abstract
The hook-swinging festival in Bengal, namely Gajan, accounts for a performative mode of cultural transmission with a vibrant articulated expression sketched and manifested in rites and narrative performances. The paper takes a strategic departure from the inscriptional paraphernalia as evidentiary cultural components. Instead, it engages with the question of how the narrative retelling of stories, legends, and social histories through poems, songs, and ritual practices becomes the way of community formation and cultural knowledge transmission in the festival of Gajan. The paper asks, is it possible to look at the cultural knowledge of a community as shared thoughts and a cultural continuity? What functions do narrative performances have in formulating communal identity and transmitting cultural knowledge in contemporary times? To delineate this, it focuses on practices and reflections of the oral and performative cultural forms, modes of visual imagination, and representations to study the cultural and social formations in/around Gajan and their creative reflections. The study argues that the recurrence, like the recitation of the poems and songs and the performances every year, does not point to an event or a determined location of the past or present; instead, it refers to a mode of existence, a method of ephemeral transfer and translation of ideas, where every single emergence of it through speech and gesture asserts cultural knowledge: collectively endorsed, mutually shared, and communally associated.
Presenters
Subhankar DuttaStudent, Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Maharashtra, India
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Civic, Political, and Community Studies
KEYWORDS
Orality, Story, Community, Gajan, Performing Body, Identity
